


Flyboy

by AquaWolfGirl



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Fighting-to-Kissing, Height difference, Potentially ooc?, Yes I know it was doomed from the start but their chemistry was hot as hell, crackship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-20
Updated: 2017-12-20
Packaged: 2019-02-17 10:57:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13075425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AquaWolfGirl/pseuds/AquaWolfGirl
Summary: There’s always one.One commander, one captain, one pilot – some flyboy who wants to be a hero. Poe Dameron is one of those boys. It's worth a shot, Amylin Holdo thinks. Worth trying to put him back in his place. Whether she succeeds or not is to be determined.For everyone who walked out of TLJ thinking that Poe Dameron somehow had sexual chemistry with everyone, even the beautiful and bad-ass purple-haired Admiral Amilyn Holdo.





	Flyboy

**Author's Note:**

> For those who want a more canon-compliant, subtle sort of fic. I walked out of the theatre with the image of Poe staring up at Holdo burned into my retinas, and I'm not complaining one bit. I noticed the tag was empty, so figured I'd try my hand at it? I apologize if something seems out of character - I didn't read Leia's novel where Holdo was introduced, and I've only seen the movie once (so far!) Hope you enjoy regardless!
> 
> (And for those of you who want straight up smut - that will come soon.)

There’s always one. 

One commander, one captain, one pilot – some flyboy who wants to be a hero. 

She’s sure there are more than just one in every squadron, but there’s always one who has the loudest voice, who commits the stupidest acts because he thinks he’s right, because he thinks a few reckless decisions that turned out positively equals every decision turning out positively.

But Poe Dameron is perhaps the most rash, trigger-happy, heroism-hungry commander – no, captain – she’s ever met. 

He’s pretty, she’ll give him that. Shorter than she’d expected, but he is pretty, and his eyes have that fire of a flyboy who’s made his share of reckless decisions that turned out better than expected.

Hours. They have hours. Hours doesn’t leave time for reckless decisions, however positively they may end. 

That doesn’t mean he won’t try and make one, though.

Lacking the title of commander, Poe Dameron isn’t on the bridge. On the one hand, that means he can’t shout out orders to lead a squadron out in an attempt to pull some careless mission where the odds are barely in their favor. On the other hand, it means she can’t know what he’s doing, or who he’s talking to, or what he has planned. 

If there’s one thing she knows about these sorts of boys, it’s that they always have a plan, and are intent on carrying it out – whether it goes along with authority’s orders or not.

“I’ll be back.” 

It’s less of an order than she would have liked, and more of a breathy confession as she strolls from the bridge. No one outside of the room pays her any attention; they’re all preparing for the inevitable. Fight, or attempt to flee. 

She hopes she’s making the right choice. She hopes she's making the one Leia would make.

Her path takes her straight to the ex-commander’s quarters, passing pilots and medics and people whose lives may be lost within hours, people who are no doubt thinking of their family, of their home, of their lives outside of the Resistance…

Her heart gives an uncomfortable squeeze, her stomach turning as she walks around the corner and finds herself opening the captain’s door, striding in to see Dameron looking out at the fleet of ships continually shooting at their shields. 

He knows she’s there. She saw him tense up as soon as she walked in, his shoulders tight and jaw clenched. He’s angry. He doesn’t like her, she knows. And why should he? She is rational. He is very much not. 

“You can be angry all you want, Captain,” she says, and she sees his gaze flicker to her for a heartbeat, observing her out of the corner of his eye. 

“Sitting like an orobird and letting them take fire at our shields isn’t a plan,” Dameron replies, his voice as tight as the muscles in his jaw as he turns to fully look at her. Oh, she can see the fire in his eyes even from here. She’d improvised something about a spark when speaking to the rest of the Resistance, but his is a wildfire, destructive and eager. 

“Plans don’t always involve jumping into an x-wing, especially when there are no x-wings for you to jump into,” Amilyn replies matter-of-factly, and she swears his jaw gets tighter. 

She can see why he’s the poster boy for the Resistance. He has that look about him. He’s charming, to be sure, with a dark shadow along his lips and jaw, dark curls and that determined look in his eyes. 

He reminds her of someone she knew. And someone Leia loved.

“We need a plan. A better plan,“ he starts, taking a step towards her, but she stands her ground. Already she can see the gears moving underneath those dark curls, already she knows she’s not going to like it.

“The pilots who flew with you,” she interrupts, and he stops, hand raised in the middle of a thought. “You cost them their lives.”

The fire flickers, dims a bit. “The Dreadnought would have wiped out our entire fleet, and you know that damn well, Admiral.“

“Any offensive action against them now will wipe out who we have left,” she protests. “And you know that it would, Dameron.”

“The Resistance-“

“The Resistance needs self-preservation, not self-sacrifice, if there’s going to be a Resistance left.”

“Sitting and waiting for our fuel to run out is not self-preservation, it's surrender!”

His voice raises, no doubt his blood running hot. And, despite her better judgment, so does hers. For another reason entirely.

There’s always one. There’s always one hot-blooded, trigger-happy, reckless flyboy in every squadron. There may be more than one, but there’s always one with the loudest voice, the craziest plans, the most careless actions. 

And her foolish heart always follows.

“You don’t understand.”

Oh, that gets him angry, she can see. His eyes are hard, his jaw clenched harder. 

“A commander commands his people to do more than just sacrifice themselves in a battle they may not win,” she insists, feeling her own blood hot in her veins as she takes another step towards the captain. 

“I didn’t command them to-“

She reaches out and presses her fingers against his lips, forcing him to stop. She fully expects him to knock her hand away, to continue fighting, because that’s what Poe Dameron does. He’s a fighter, thinking the odds are in his favor even when they are very much not. Instead he just stares up at her, and she can see that fire dimming ever so slightly.

“In order to be the spark of hope for all of those outcasts and the downtrodden, we need to stay lit.” Her voice shakes, despite the firmness of it. “All it takes is one stupid, reckless decision to blow us out. So I suggest you stop planning whatever you’re planning, Captain Dameron, because we’re dim enough as it is.”

She pulls her fingers away from his lips, watching as his gaze finds her fingertips and follows them. It takes a moment for him to look back up at her, but she can see the anger in his eyes. She didn’t get through to him, but she didn’t expect to. It takes more than just pretty metaphors to get through to hot-blooded pilots.

“… yes, Admiral.”

It’s bitten out reluctantly, and she knows that he won’t stop. He won’t stop until his plan is carried out, so she’ll just have to do everything in her power to counteract it, whatever it may be. 

She has to change her strategy.

“Good pilots died because of your decision to blow up the Dreadnought.”

“I know that, Admiral, but it was a risk we needed to take, that ship would have caused … “ He throws his hands up, some sort of gesture of chaos and calamity. Death. That ship would have caused death, she knows.

“They had families.”

“We’re in a war, there are sacrifices-“ he tries.

“How do you think their lovers feel?” she demands, and whatever counterpoint he was about to make dies on his lips. She can see him backing up, mentally, trying to make sense of what she just said. 

“Lovers?” he repeats. 

“I’ve heard you’re quite the charmer.” It’s true. There are stories of how Comm- no, Captain Poe Dameron can charm his way out of almost any situation. He’s a flirt, and a scoundrel, and doesn’t that sound familiar? “How many of those pilots did you flirt with, Dameron? How many flirted with you? How many did you consider taking back to your quarters at some point?” Her voice is harder, now, harsher as she takes another step towards him, getting in his space. He doesn’t back down. She didn’t expect him to. There’s a bit of satisfaction that he has to look further up at her, though, his chin tilted upwards. He’s still trying to figure out what she’s trying to say, she can see his mind working. “How many lovers are grieving on this ship, do you think?”

He doesn’t have a retort for that. He doesn’t have an excuse. There’s no talk of risk, of needing to win, of her lacking a finite plan. He just stares at her, mouth slightly open, as her words finally land. 

“Siblings. Friends. Lovers. Gone. They weren’t just pilots, Poe Dameron.”

She turns before she can see his reaction, before he can even reply. She doesn’t even get halfway to the door before there’s a hand on her wrist, callouses from piloting an X-wing scraping against her pale skin. Whirling around, she’s nearly nose to nose with the flyboy, and her heart flies into her throat as he almost snarls at her. 

“You think I don’t know what happened?” he snaps – no, it’s more than that. It’s nearly yelled in her face, and she narrows her eyes at the pilot. “You think I don’t know my friends died? With all due respect, Admiral, you didn’t see them die like I did. You watched from the bridge. I watched from my cockpit as they burned. I know what happened to them, and I know that I was the one who caused it, all right?”

“And yet you continue to make the same stupid decisions over and over, wanting to play the damn hero the save the day. I didn't need to watch them die from a cockpit to know that the last thing the Resistance needs is to die knowing their loved ones burned for nothing!”

“It wasn’t nothing, we blew up a Dreadnought!”

“At what cost, Commander!?”

She kept her voice so steady before, but now she yells back in his face, and immediately she feels sick. This man is under her command. She is the leader of the Resistance, and she’s yelling in a pilot’s face. This isn’t the way a leader should act. Leia would have stopped five steps behind, would have turned and left, or would have softened long ago. She stares at the man below her, his eyes wide in surprise at her outburst.

“I-“ she starts, unsure if she should apologize, or keep going on her tirade, the fire already lit. 

“Are we going to die today?”

For all of the control he lacks in his actions, his voice has always been steady, even when arguing with her. It shakes, now, and that’s perhaps her breaking point.  
“I hope not,” she says, using that word again. Hope. They are hope. Or, at least, they’re trying to be. Is it possible to be hope when they have so little of it left?

She expects some sort of retort, some sort of argument that hope isn’t enough, that they need a plan, that they need to do something rash and stupid and – 

“Answer me, Admiral.” The man’s in no place to be giving her orders, but she feels inclined to follow anyway, her gaze finding the clenched muscle along the left side of his jaw. “We have hours left before we’re out of fuel. We have hours before our shields are down, and they blow us to pieces. I need you to tell me,” Poe says, and she realizes he’s much closer, his hand still on her wrist. He’s holding her tight, his hand warm against her skin. “If we follow whatever plan you have, if you even have one, are we going to die today?”

There’s fear in his voice, and she has to wonder if what she said finally, finally affected him. What she said about lovers, about families, about siblings. 

“We won’t know until we follow it through, will we?” she asks. “We won’t win. But we may live, and that will have to do, Dameron.”

She can tell her answer is unsatisfactory, that he wants to win, that he wants to be the hero, because of course he does. But he says nothing. 

He doesn’t let her go, either. And he doesn’t step back. He lingers, their noses maybe a hand’s width apart. She remembers when she was younger, when there was a pilot who was taller than her, with blonde hair and a scar across his mouth that forced his grin to be lopsided and completely charming. A pilot who took her back to his ship, who pressed her up against the side and kissed her so fiercely she thought she would turn to stardust from the force of it. 

She wonders if Dameron kisses the same, and despite her better judgment, her gaze flickers to his lips. It’s a fraction of a heartbeat, but the damage is already done. 

If Dameron’s going to make a reckless, stupid decision, she’d much rather it be kissing her than sending their fleet out on a suicide mission. She tells herself it’s the lesser of two evils as he moves to brush his lips against hers, that maybe this will sate his need to do something rash. 

She hopes to hell it will satisfy hers, too.

What started as a spark, a simple brush of lips, turns into a flame as her hand slips up into his dark curls. His hand finds her shoulder, thumb slipping into the dip along bone and skin. She’s glad for the touch, his skin hot against hers. That, and if his hand slipped into her hair and messed up her headpiece, she’s sure she’d have to answer some questions on the bridge.

The man kisses like how she presumes he does everything – enthusiastically, with some fire and a bite to it. She’s thrown backward in years to drunken, sloppy kisses with similarly hot-blooded flyboys that were brushed off with a laugh in the morning. 

This time, she wonders if they’ll even be alive in the morning to brush it off. 

The sparks that burn the hottest often die the fastest, though, and he pulls away from her like he’s been burned. The sound of their lips parting is too loud to her ears, too loud in the silence of the captain’s quarters. He stares at her with wide, wild eyes, knowing full well he just flew at lightspeed over so many lines and crashed right through boundaries. 

“I … shouldn’t have done that,” he mutters, but he doesn’t sound like he regrets it. 

“No, you shouldn’t have.” She doesn’t mean for it to come out as breathy as it does, and she doesn’t mean for her gaze to shift from his wide eyes to his lips, to the curls her fingers mussed, back to his eyes. 

They’re at an impasse, it seems. And, to her surprise, he’s the one to break the silence, coughing before the fire returns to his eyes. 

“I hope you know what you’re doing, Admiral.”

She ignores the way his voice is gruffer, and keeps staring at where he’d been long after he brushes by her. She can hear the sound of the door opening and closing, the slight hiss of it sliding. He stomps away, and she listens to the echoing of his footsteps before they fade away entirely, and she’s left in silence. 

There’s always one. 

And she falls for them every damn time.


End file.
